Raw airborne radar echoes over polar ice (IceBridge)

In plain English

What it measures. Raw radar echoes bounced off and through glacier ice in Alaska, recording the strength of the returning signal as the aircraft flew over.

How it's made. Collected by the Arizona Radio-Echo Sounder, an ice-penetrating radar flown aboard a small survey plane over selected Alaskan glaciers.

How & where you'd use it. A low-level building-block measurement that glaciologists process further to map ice thickness and internal layers; most people would use the derived results rather than these raw echoes.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › RADAR › RADAR IMAGERY

Coverage & cadence

Time span2015-08-26 → 2021-05-13
Measured byDHC-3 (RADAR ECHO SOUNDERS)
Processing levelLevel 1B
Spatial extent-157, 56, -129, 63
FormatsHDF5
StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time

Official description

This data set contains radar echograms acquired by the Arizona Radio-Echo Sounder (ARES) over select glaciers in Alaska.

Get the data

irares1b_access.py

import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="IRARES1B",
    version="1",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from NSIDC_CPRD

Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.

What's measured

Coverage & cadence

What you can do with it

Get the data

Official links